Kitty Te Riele

For marginalised young people, alternative education settings – referred to here as flexible learning programs (FLPs) – are thought to provide a powerful ‘counter-space’ to damaging experiences of mainstream schooling. Such programs are inherently contradictory, with potential to also reproduce stigma and disadvantage. The provision of secondary schooling via FLPs is significant. In Australia, for example, the sector serves over 70 000 students. A better understanding of student experiences and outcomes in these educational spaces is needed. Drawing on interview data with staff, students, and graduates from two FLPs in Victoria, this paper employs Soja's ideas about conceived, perceived, and lived space to explore what outcomes are valued and to consider how success is measured in these programs. The paper shows that FLP staff and students valued a diverse range of academic, social, and personal outcomes that support a more expansive vision of education and monitoring student success than dominant perspectives. The paper suggests that these FLPs are both a counter-space and a space that connects back to the mainstream, optimally understood as third space, a hybrid place, bringing together the conventional and the alternative to create a valued and valuable education for marginalised young people.

This paper expounds a dynamic understanding of interest, including cognitive and affective dimensions. This conceptualization of interest is applied to findings from research in two flexible learning settings that provided access to foundation-level credentials for young people who, for whatever reason, had disengaged from or sought alternatives to traditional schooling models. The discussion of findings begins with an outline of how interest played out in the two programmes, before examining how interest was related to learning and to belonging. In relation to learning, interest acts as a motivator, draws on short- and long-term goal relevance, and enhances academic achievement. In relation to belonging, interest serves to build in-group connections through shared identity, but also acts as a platform for launching enhanced connections with the wider community. We conclude that interest is about more than curriculum relevance for individuals, and holds significance for both learning and belonging. This may inform approaches to education not only in flexible learning programmes but also in conventional schools.

By virtue of their age, young people as a group are the object of both practice interventions and policy attention ‘done’ to them on premises based on adult perceptions. Of particular interest for this book, however, are the ways distinctions are made within the youth cohort. In much research, policy and service provision, certain young people are identified as being more in need of support, more at risk, or more vulnerable than others of the same age. There are, however, some conundrums when categorising young people in terms of vulnerability. In this chapter I discuss two core dilemmas, related to the locus of attention, and the focus on a minority.